Aston Martin were ‘just slow’ in Silverstone qualifying

Sebastian Vettel was frustrated by the lack of pace on show by Aston Martin on Saturday, stating they were simply “just slow” in qualifying.

Vettel and Aston Martin team-mate Lance Stroll will start 18th and 20th on Sunday as the team recorded the worst combined qualifying performance on the grid on a wet afternoon at Silverstone – just a stone’s throw from the team’s factory.

With their double Q1 elimination, four-time World Champion Vettel admitted the team are starting on the back foot, despite fixing the tyre pressure issue that hampered them in the wet in Canada a fortnight ago.

“It’s the same thing for all of us. We’ve been pushing, we are pushing so hard and with a Saturday like this, Sunday gets really difficult,” Vettel told Sky F1 after qualifying.

🚨 OUT IN Q1 🚨

16. Alex Albon
17. Kevin Magnussen
18. Sebastian Vettel
19. Mick Schumacher
20. Lance Stroll

Not good news for the team based up the road at Silverstone.#BritishGP 🇬🇧 #F1 pic.twitter.com/dNs2Ez0Z7n

— PlanetF1 (@Planet_F1) July 2, 2022

“But it is what it is, we turn the page and try to see what we can do tomorrow. But for sure, just looking at today, it’s disappointing.

“I think we learned our lesson from Canada, and it wouldn’t happen again. So I think today we were, in all honesty, we’re just slow and we need to see why and understand it because there was something that we were missing.”

Stroll will line up last at lights out on Sunday as both Aston Martin drivers toiled in qualifying, and the Canadian was also slightly perplexed as to why he struggled – but feels several factors did not help his cause when trying to improve at the end of Q1.

“I’m not sure,” he said when asked why his car lacked pace. “I just didn’t have grip and then at the end of the session we put a new set of tyres on, I had a terrible out lap with traffic and stuff, and it’s all about generating temperature on the out lap.

“So with only one push lap at the end of the session, I had stone cold tyres and starting the lap I lost a second in the first sector [and] recovered two seconds in the last sector, just because of the track improvements.

“So there was obviously still a lot of lap time on the table, but still, we just looked like we were on the back foot throughout the whole way of qualifying and not really that competitive.”

Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz took his maiden Formula 1 pole in challenging conditions on Saturday, with World Championship…